Well, plans say the government is subsidizing Electric cars and Plugin-Hybrids with 4,000 Euro. Half payed by the government and the other half from car manufacturers.
They even want to expand these subsidies to small businesses and extend the amount to 8,000 Euros.
The problem indeed is that this would not help to banish air pollution, because the numbers are to low. The second thing is, that only wealthier people would benefit from these subsidies. You have to be able to afford a new car at first. And second you have to be able to afford an electric car. And even if you are the typical buy brand new cars guy, you typically drive these cars 6 to 10 years. So these subsidies might come in an unpleasent moment of your car-buying-cycle.
Free public transportation could reduce car traffic and everybody could benefit. Even poor people.
In light of this, the decision to shut down nuclear power plants by 2022, but keep the coal power plants is, err, interesting? Sure, renewable sources are increasing, but fossil fuels are still the biggest source. I wonder where the energy for electric cars will come from if they truly become popular. Keep in mind that Germany imports energy. So phasing out nuclear power, while still importing from nations running nuclear is somewhat hypocritical (e.g. France has some plants along the border).
Even in Germany, politics are politics and fears are not always rational.
Germany imports energy. It also imports electricity sometimes. But Germany actually has a large export surplus for electricity over the last five years - even though several nuclear power plants have been closed. And the surplus is widening.
> So phasing out nuclear power, while still importing from nations running nuclear is somewhat hypocritical (e.g. France has some plants along the border).
Germany has now the largest electricity export surplus in Europe. Germany also has a large electricity export surplus with France.
The German export surplus of electricity in 2017 was 60TWH. 2016 56 TWH, 2015 57TWH. Etc.
In money this means an export surplus in 2017 of 1.4 Billion Euro.
Renewable energy is now at 36% for electricity and Germany now for the first time has days where the whole country is powered by renewable electricity.
> e.g. France has some plants along the border
The old french nuclear power plants Germany would like to see closed.
> I wonder where the energy for electric cars will come from if they truly become popular.
Depends where you are, but I live in North Germany and it's possible to have large amount of surplus electricity in one or two decades from wind with buffers (like hydro in Norway which is then transported via HVDC lines to Germany).
Great, but my point still stands. Would I like more renewables? Of course! Would I prefer running the nuclear powerplants we already have instead of coal? Yes.
The surplus is great, but just illustrates the issue with renewables. I just wish we could be a bit more truthful about the surplus. Large numbers are nice, but that’s manager level detail. A surplus when you don’t need it and have no way of storing it is useless, and you end up paying people to use electrisity, which has happened. And that’s with only 36% renewable energy. This problem will get worse, not better.
I guess electric cars will be able to store some of that by charging during the day and overnight. But we’re still far away from 100% renewable without electric cars, and just because we’re not burning petrol or diesel doesn’t make electric cars environmentally friendly.
> Would I prefer running the nuclear powerplants we already have instead of coal? Yes.
I would not. But I'm for phasing out coal next.
> A surplus when you don’t need it and have no way of storing it is useless, and you end up paying people to use electrisity, which has happened.
these are rare events. As I said Germany has a surplus export not only in TWH, but also in Euro.
The large exports numbers are not because we have renewable energy we can't store, but because we have too much power plant capacity and the owners don't want to shut them down while they are making money. Thus one can export the surplus production - the power plants are already there and paid.
Also keep in mind, the old days of an energy market which is limited to a country is over. The EU is also about a EU-wide energy market. This transition is ongoing and in the future you will see more of this and you will see whole new electricity networks set up between EU member states - for example connecting all north-sea countries. These networks will also buffer demand spikes. For example upcoming HVDC lines between Norway and Germany will be able to reverse transport directions based on demand or storage priority. Stuff like that is already in the works, like this 1.4GW line between Norway and North Germany
A second line is thought to follow somewhen in the next decade...
> have no way of storing it is useless
Storing electricity will get more important in the future. But the transition phase to 100% renewable is still more than three decades and when storage is REALLY needed might be a decade or more away.
Right now it is more important to deliver surplus energy to regions where this would be needed. But keep in mind that this is also not an infrastructure problem, but also about regions unwilling to import electricity from other regions. Regions are egoistic and they want to benefit from the electricity production without having the negative sides.
For example many regions in Germany were keen to have a nuclear power plant and were happy to profit from electricity sales, but literally not a single region could persuade their population to allow storing of nuclear waste, hosting the dirty parts of the nuclear industry (like reprocessing plants) or setting up some of the 'riskier' nuclear power plants (like breeders).
Germany heavily subsidised solar power in the 200x timeframe, and was probably the driving force behind the Moore's-Law-like improvements the technology has seen.
So that seems to be among the most rational and farsighted political decisions, ever.
Nuclear power is politically impossible to sustain in Germany. It's also vastly more expensive than any other major source of power. Those are facts just as hard as any natural science. The world has moved on, and the supposedly irrational environmentalists and politicians have dramatically improved the technology, while all the science fiction enthusiasts are still fetishising nuclear power long after it has become embarrassing.
The main problem Germany is facing, is the storage of Energy on Sunny, Windy days. Storing this energy in car Batteries would be an extra bonus. Plus, regenerativ energy is going to increase further.
Yes, your absolutely right about the coal plants. And I am pretty sure they are going to be shut down. But the main problem is, nuclear waste will stay for millions of years, while CO2 in the atmosphere will probably vanish in centuries. Not nice but that's the decision to make.
I don't speak German so I can't check how the article got his maps, but I don't think the winds in France are mostly West-East. Also I think it's more than just sending the fallout on the other side of the border in the location of the nuclear power plants:
-close to a water source with the Rhine basin
-close to where the electricity will be used (Paris and its suburbs on the West side, Germany to sell on the East side, major cities all around)
-close to where heavy industry exists (both for use and production of the construction pieces)
-Outside of the areas of seismic risk
There are many so called "Hidden Champions", which are often located in these areas. Farming and so on is not very typical for German villages. A village with 3,000 people has perhaps one to three farms employing at most 10 - 20 people.
Well, the Projected Delivery Date is 25th November 2017.
How do I know?
Took the number and looked it up at ups.
I think, I'm not sure, but I think, if ups delivers on time. Cortana will give you a message, stating the package will arive tomorrow right on 24th of November. Just one day before.
Maybe John David Back will give us an update, when his package arrived.
BTW delivery times in the US are terrible compared to Germany. Next Day delivery is the state of art. Germany is also much smaller in comparison.
Laser printers need much power for heating. Would it be possible to switch to a ink printer?
They should work fine on 10 to 20 Watts. They even have external Poweradapters like a Laptop.
It depends on the usagepattern. Not printing enough would dry up the ink. Printing to much could be to expensive or to slow.
But heating dust up with a laser to melt it down on paper seems to be very inefficient in terms of energyefficiency.
This is veering offtopic but laser printers don't actually use the laser for heating the toner, they use it to create charges on an image drum which picks up the toner electrostatically. The fuser assembly is a very simple resistive heater.
Electricity is $0.08-0.15 per KWH; gas is about $2-3/gallon. (There are obviously exceptions -- Hawaii electricity is almost German prices, and it is progressive, so if you use a lot you pay a high marginal rate. There are also specific areas with really expensive gas, maybe 2x the cheapest gas.)
Electric seems like an easy choice in the UK -- high fuel costs and not high electricity prices -- and a less obviously good choice in places in the US with cheap fuel (Midwest, south) but expensive power (I think some small utilities have high rates due to legacy costs)
It doesn't seem like a clear winner in Germany yet, or at least is relatively less good than in California (high fuel costs, high subsidies for electric cars, high traffic, and relatively low electric costs).
If I lived in Germany (goal!) I'd still consider getting an electric as a city car if everything else worked out, just for environmental reasons, but I'd probably still be tempted to get a 550d or something instead if I were doing long trips. Whereas in California and Washington State I definitely want a Model 3 next, or if I had to buy today, maybe an i3.
It is a political isue. In Germany the average income is at about 30.000,- Euro.
So many people cannot aford any EV, even the cheapest. So they are excluded from any subsidies.
But they pay their taxes. They work for the rich people, the company owners. They work for their profits, so that the rich are able to pay taxes or transfer the money to panama and avoid paying taxes.
The party SPD is a working class party for those people earning about 30.000,- and less.
And now consider to explain those people, that they pay taxes to subsidies the drives for the rich people.
Driving Porsche 918 with Weisach-Update for example.
There is no way to do this without an upper limit.
It is highly optimized for the home row on the german vocabulary. Support for Programming is also very good.
It has 6 different layers
• Lowercase
• Uppercase
• Special Characters (Braces etc.)
• Navigation and Numbers
• Greek Alphabet (same layout as normal Characters, ιαεοσ)
• Mathematical signs Σℕℝ∂
But I rarely use layer 5 and 6.
I think layer 3,4 and 6 could be a good fit for every keyboard layout.
I live in Zurich and have been thinking of switching.. If you don't mind, I have a couple questions:
How did you handle learning it given so many layers? Stickers seem like trouble..
Do you find it better or worse for dealing with use of occasional accents/etc from a 3rd latin language, (i.e. French) than a more traditional compose key route?
Hi, I've been using Neo2 for a couple of years now, so maybe I can help you with these.
Don't use stickers! You should touch-type neo from the beginning, so avoid looking at the keyboard. I had a print-out next to me for the first couple of weeks.
You also don't need to memorize all the layers from the start. I use layers 5 and 6 very very rarely, and for the Greek letters you can mostly guess (α is on a, β on b, ε on e, σ on s, etc). I still don't know everything on layers 5 and 6 (where's the ℵ again?...). Start with the letters and punctuation (layers 1&2 plus bits of 3) and just type a lot of text for a week, maybe picking up things on layer 3 as you go. It'll be painfully slow at first and your fingers might feel strangely exhausted (I never learned touch typing with QWERTZ) but you'll get faster soon :)
It took me two to three weeks to get to a level where typing wasn't a total point and another couple of weeks to exceed my old typing speed. The most helpful thing was to jump right in and never switch back to QWERTZ -- total immersion. I was a student at the time so I could take that luxury, but if you have a job you might not have that luxury. I have no idea how to best go about learning Neo if you still need to be able to type quickly while learning.
I rarely use Layer 4, I should probably learn that, but with a TrackPoint navigation is very easy without leaving the home row.
Occasional accents are no problem at all, Neo has combining diacritics (dead keys) so it's similar to a compose approach (i.e. you press ` then e to get è, or ° a to get å). Very easy. They're all on the key left of backspace, the one below it, and the one left of 1.
Cool, thanks! I'll do a little practice and then jump in to immersion at the start of my next vacation then. I just tried a little using an onscreen keyboard as a cheat, and it doesn't really feel all that different from learning chorded keyboard.
At least for me, I the sense of physical fatigue is about the stress of dealing with the higher degrees of freedom on a regular keyboard together with the location memory task. But needing a chorded keyboard seems like a bridge to far in a work environment.
It takes time. So I started with a typing program (ktouch) and lections for neo2.
There are 6 layers, but you have to consider that uppercase and lowercase is almost the same.
The layers 5 and 6 are not in my usage pattern.
Layer 4 is one of the easiest to learn, because it maps the right hand to the numpad and the left one to arrows like sdfe in computer games. a for pos1 and g for end. So there is some easy logic behind this.
At the end there is just layer 3. The organisation of the braces is that they appear in pairs and are arranged in a pattern.
So in Zurich they do a little bit more french as in germany. So I didn't had to use accents a lot. So I can't say a lot about it. èéâǎȩẽ. These characters are a little bit away from the optimal position. But they do not need a Compose Button. èéâ only needs two button strokes. ǎȩẽ needs the Shift button for the first stroke. But the accents are every time on the same position just on different layers. A little bit difficult to explain. Especially if you have not used accents before.
What I would suggest is to take neo2 as a basic layout, take the good parts and addapt it to the usage pattern of the french language.
very cool, thanks! Composing the other accents actually works well for me since I use them infrequently but just frequently enough to get annoyed if there is no system in their placement.
I use neo and find QWERTZ annoying to type on other people's computers. I still use it on my phone though, that's a completely different kind of typing and feels completely separate. Ergonomic layouts also likely wouldn't work well with swipe typing, half the words would be dashing left and right on the home row ;)
Other people's computers are easy if they run Linux (setxkbmap de neo) and okay if they run Windows (there's a no-install no-admin tool to remap), but you can't switch a Mac temporarily without installing the keyboard layout and even then getting the layers to work is awful. So I'd say you're half-right about that.
I have no issue with the shortcuts, it takes a while to learn them anew but they're no less convenient because of it. I started using Emacs years after Neo and I have no complaints about the keymappings, so it really can't be that bad ;)
In my experience, still having azerty on the phone is not too inconvenient: while I type blind on the Bépo, I stay visual with Azerty. This is enough of a difference that I don't confuse the two.
Just to add, while Neo is optimized for German text it also works very well with English (better than QWERTY/QWERTZ at any rate). These days I type more English text than German and it's no problem at all. Though it probably wouldn't be a native English speaker's first choice.
320 colonies at 4,000 are roughly 1,280,000 honeybees.
In fact BOBs are 10 times more effective than honeybees. They pollinate at a time where honeybees are still asleep.
And 4,000 is considered a small colonie. They go up to 70,000 and more in the right season.